Israel Knohl

Israel Knohl was born in 1952

Israel Knohl was born in 1952 in Giv'at Aliyah. His parents, Dov and Shoshana, were among the founders of Kfar Etzion. His brother, Rabbi Elyashiv Knohl, was the rabbi of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion.

After military service he earned a bachelor's degree in Talmud at the Hebrew University. He then moved to the Bible Department and completed his PhD in 1988 under Moshe Greenberg, writing on the Priestly source and the Holiness code.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, he joined the Bible Department of the Hebrew University and chaired it from 1999 to 2001. He held the Yehezkel Kaufmann chair in Biblical studies, was a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and taught as a visiting professor at Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago and Harvard.

His book The Sanctuary of Silence argued that the Holiness code was added to the Priestly source, and it won the Shkop Prize. In The Messiah Before Jesus in 2000 he proposed that a belief in a messiah who rose after 3 days existed before Christianity. In Where are We From? he argued that the Israelites formed in the 12th century BCE from 3 related groups.

He lives in Jerusalem and has 3 children. His first wife, Rivka, died in 2003, and he later married writer Dalia Cohen-Knohl. He stopped teaching in 2021 and retired from the university in early 2022.